


The Guide to Chivalric Virtues

by BrighteyedJill



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Chivalry, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Implied Child Death, Kaer Seren, Minor Character Death, The Inherent Tragedy of Witchers, Witcher Training (The Witcher)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:49:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28813701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrighteyedJill/pseuds/BrighteyedJill
Summary: When Kaer Seren, the home of the School of the Griffin, is destroyed, Coën is adrift and alone. But if he can hold on to what makes a Griffin a Griffin, he may be able to go on.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 37
Collections: The Witcher Quick Fic #04





	The Guide to Chivalric Virtues

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Anoke and the rest of the Discord server for the assistance with Griffin lore!

Coën had been out hunting since before dawn. The cold didn’t bother him as much as it did some of the older Griffins, and the quiet mountain forests were a welcome break from the keep crowded with trainees, instructors, and witchers home from the Path for the winter: all the noise and bustle and never-ending chores that had driven Coën to volunteer for this solitary duty. He had his bow trained on a plump buck, waiting for it to turn and present a better target, when a distant noise brought the deer’s head up.

As the animal leapt away, Coën sighed and lowered his bow. It was only then he realized that the distant noise had grown louder. In fact, the ground beneath his feet had begun to tremble. The sound echoed off the cliff faces and broad mountainsides, impossible to locate. Cursing, Coën pelted back the way he’d come, towards a rocky outcrop that overlooked the valley. 

The rumbling had become a cacophony, an onslaught of sound and shaking that sent Coën tripping over the tumbling ground to land in the snow. He dragged himself to his feet and stumbled onwards until he reached the overlook. There, in the purple dusk of the winter evening, he saw what had befallen Kaer Seren.

Many years later, Coën couldn’t recall the moment when he fully understood the magnitude of the loss. Perhaps it hadn’t been until several years later, wintering at Kaer Morhen, when he'd seen the handful of remaining Wolves rattling around in the ruins of their castle. He’d thought, “What a sad, broken life.” And then he’d realized that the Wolves had each other and that place, as run-down as it was, and Coën had nothing and no one.

But at the time, when he’d run from that rocky outcrop through the deepening twilight, scraping his hands on rocks and stumbling again and again on the uneven ground, he’d come up the last ridge before what had been the road home, and realized how completely the keep had been destroyed. 

Later, Coën thought perhaps that was when he began to believe that the Griffins were gone. He would come to realize that he was still a Griffin, even if there was no longer a school for him to return to. Being a Griffin meant something special, beyond just the calling of being a witcher. Griffins had purpose and obligation; Coën had had that drilled into him from his earliest training. They were an honorable brotherhood, bound to uphold the chivalric code and to be true to one another. And if one man did not a brotherhood make, at least Coën could behave as if he remembered what brotherhood meant. He would always be a Griffin, because even then, in the immensity of horror and grief of those next few hours, days, and months, he’d clung to the values his brotherhood had given him. 

**Valor**  
  
Coën ran towards where the white clouds of snow still rose over the settling mass. In the weak moonlight, he could see that the destruction extended all the way down the valley, rock formations smashed, the bulk of the keep shattered and cast down. Where there had been massive towers and parapets, nothing was now visible above the snow. Coën had seen avalanches before, but not on this scale. This had been no natural act. The peaks of the double mountains above the keep were jagged and broken, as if they’d been knocked down by some god or giant, bringing down half the mountain in their wake. Magic--must have been.

The terrain became unstable as Coën struggled on: loose snow and rock, fallen trees, and debris all churned together over what had once been a trail. With the landscape so changed, Coën couldn’t tell for certain where exactly the keep had been. All had been swept away. But witchers were strong and fast. There would be some survivors. Perhaps even now they were helping each other to dig out those too injured to free themselves and rallying together somewhere to take shelter and prepare to a defense against whoever had done this. In this cold, time would be of the essence, and an extra pair of hands could make all the difference. 

Coën paused, up to his waist in loose snow, and looked back at the trail he’d broken so far: a paltry distance. He could easily exhaust himself and do no good for anyone. He should get help, prepare, not rush in. 

But there _was_ no one else. No other Griffins who hadn't been at the keep, and no one else who might be willing to come to their aid. “Know when you’re outmatched,” Grandmaster Erland had always told them. “A dead witcher can’t fight another day. So if you’re going to charge in against hopeless odds, you’d best be certain the cause is worth dying for.”

Coën gritted his teeth and struggled on.

**Compassion**

On the afternoon of the next day, Coën found one of his brothers alive. The red patch caught his attention in the endless field of white. It had been snowing steadily all morning--the slate grey sky dropping large, fluffy flakes as Coën had slogged through the destruction. But this blood was fresh, spreading even through the new layer of snow.

Coën dug down to find a man upright in a pile of ice and smashed masonry. Coën had lived at Kaer Seren since before he could walk, and he knew every instructor, every full witcher, and even all the trainees, save some of those who’d arrived since he’d been on the Path these past two years. Still, it took him several minutes to come up with a name: Aleksy, who’d gone through the Trials when Coën had still been in the nursery. This fall Aleksy had brought back jars of a smoked fish he’d traded for far to the south, so spicy it made even witchers’ eyes water. One night after dinner he’d made all of them try some while he laughed uproariously, and that night the Gwent bets revolved around the losers eating more of the horrible stuff. 

Aleksy’s eyes were closed, his hair matted with blood, and his face ashen against the white of the snow where he lay limp and unmoving. He was still warm, and bubbles of blood burst on his lips as he let out a rattling breath.

“Aleksy, I'm here,” Coën tried, but there was no response. 

Coën dug, gloved hands pulling out chunks of ice and rock amongst the packed snow. The sun was sinking below the horizon again by the time Coën uncovered the corner of a beam hewn from a single massive oak, like those that had held up the vaulted ceiling of the great hall. Coën could see only the splintered end, which was pressed tightly to Aleksy’s chest and frozen firmly in place. Unmovable. 

Coën let out a long, slow breath, and didn't allow himself to think past the next moment. He crawled over and dug on the opposite side, fingertips numbing in the cold, but he soon uncovered a boulder braced up against Aleksy’s back, much too large to shift. Further down would only be more of the same, but harder packed from holding up the weight of the rest. And Aleksy hadn’t stirred at all, hadn’t opened his eyes, hadn’t spoken. 

Coën beat his hands against the snow, howling in incoherent rage, past caring if he was heard by the local wolf pack or a passing leshen or the villains who’d caused this disaster. When he hadn’t the strength to scream any more, he sat up and watched as Aleksy’s torturous breaths pushed more blood out from between his lips. Coën felt as if each time he himself breathed in, his lungs had to push against the entire weight of the avalanche. 

After the sun had sunk completely below the horizon, Coën took the dagger from his belt and eased Aleksy’s passing.

**Honor**

The trip out of the Dragon Mountains was long and hungry. Coën had his armor and his weapons, but little else. In the past year on the Path, Coën had gathered a few dozen interesting-looking stones. He’d been carving them this winter, making each one into whatever shape the stone seemed to suggest. Last week he’d given a carved turtle to one of the new trainees who’d been homesick. His most recent project, which was shaping up to be an otter, he’d left on his bedside table in his room when he’d gone out hunting. Gone, now, along with all his alchemy supplies and clothing. His travel gear. His horse, that he’d scrimped and saved to buy and been so proud to ride into the keep in the fall.

Borusowa was the last real marker of civilization in the mountain foothills before the lonely path to Kaer Seren. Coën limped into town with his clothes still stained with the blood of his brothers. The town’s notice board had a few promising offerings, but before Coën could pick one, the village headman hurried up to him. 

“Master Witcher!” he said, unexpectedly cheerful. “Quite early in the season for you to be passing through, isn’t it?”

The man didn’t wait for an explanation, which was fortunate. These villagers would find out soon enough what had happened at Kaer Seren, but Coën did not have the words to tell them. 

He let himself be pulled along by the man’s chatter, and was surprised to be ushered into the man’s home, to his table, and to be presented by the headman’s smiling wife with a bowl of stew and a chunk of fresh bread--the first warm food he’d had since...before. 

“I hope you’ll see things from my view,” the headman was saying as Coën plowed through the food before him. “If the count’s daughter wants to get married here, and he wants the dragon gone before that happens, what else can be done?”

Coën blinked at him. “These are the Dragon Mountains, sir,” he said. “A dragon has always lived here.”

“It’s only a name,” the headman said with a shrug. “And dragons are monsters! Are you not a monster slayer?”

Coën glanced at his empty bowl, at the headman’s wife hovering nearby to listen, then back at the man who was watching him so eagerly. His thoughts came sluggishly, as cold and stiff as the rest of him. “We haven’t killed any dragons for almost a century now. They’re not dumb beasts. It’s against our code.”

“I see.” The headman narrowed his eyes at Coën. “But you should know that this is very important to me, and to the count.” 

The headman set a full purse of the table and drew it open, displaying more coin than Coën had ever seen in one place. The money glittered invitingly. 

“No one need know ‘twas you who did the deed,” the headman said quietly. “If you like, I’ll make up a story of some visiting knight. What’s important is that the dragon be destroyed. What say you?”

Coën stared at the purse. The money it held might well be as much as Coën had earned his last year on the Path. He could buy food, supplies. A horse. And the headman was right, even if he didn’t know why: none of Coën’s brothers would ever know. There was no one left to tell Coën he shouldn’t do it, or to admonish him if he did. That decided him. 

“Apologies, sir. Witchers of the Griffin School do not kill dragons. I cannot help you.” Coën pushed to his feet, gave a small bow to the headman’s wife, and went for the door.

“If you won’t do it,” the headman called, “I’ll find another one of you mutant freaks who will!”

“No,” Coën said softly. “You won’t.” He left the house and eased the door shut behind him. 

**Generosity**

Laskowa was a proper town, one set on the banks of the Tango river, where the villages clustered in the foothills came to trade. No witchers had been through since they all went up the passes in the fall, so jobs were plentiful. This close to Kaer Seren, no one was overawed by a single scrawny young witcher. 

Coën found a tavern on the far edge of town that let him sleep in the hayloft of their barn in exchange for mucking out stalls each morning. So he slept warm and dry as he worked through the contracts on offer. The coin he earned went for this bit of equipment or that. He’d need supplies before he could return to the Path.

News spread of the destruction of Kaer Seren when the snows melted and the merchants who usually peddled their wares there returned with goods unsold and tales of a ghastly ruin. No one said anything to Coën about it, but from time to time he noticed one of the townspeople watching him with something like pity in their eyes. 

During Coën’s third month in town, he found himself with a single spare coin after doing his market day shopping. He was staring at it in his hand when the warm, homey smell of bread carried him back to the kitchens at Kaer Seren as a trainee, kneading dough under the cook’s watchful eye. His nose led him to the bakery stall, and he reasoned that buying food wasn’t really a waste. He got in line. 

As Coën stepped up to purchase his bread, the man at the next stall made a panicked, strangled noise. Coën glanced over to see him scrabbling at the goods on his table, a motley assortment of fabric, kitchen goods, and odds and ends. Coën’s eye caught on a finely woven tapestry, darkened somewhat with age, but still exquisite. As the man dragged the weaving off the table, Coën glimpsed the pattern on a corner--stars on a deep blue background picked out in silver thread. Coën’s breath stuck in his throat, and when he looked at the man’s wide and terrified eyes, Coën knew he was not mistaken. 

This tapestry had hung in the great hall at Kaer Seren, one of twelve depicting different alignments of the celestial bodies. Coën remembered sitting before those tapestries, perhaps this very one, under the tutelage of Master Bartosz, who’d taught cartography and navigation, on a warm summer morning. “Pay attention, you mutton-headed lot,” Bartosz had said, cuffing the nearest student. “Knowing the stars in their seasons can save you from ending up in Vicovaro when you meant to go to Velen!” And he’d cackled in that loud, deeply self-satisfied way of his.

“Master Witcher?” the baker woman prompted him. “Are you wanting aught?”

The merchant was shoving the tapestry behind him now, stray threads floating down to the mud in its wake. It was clearly only a torn remnant salvaged from the rubble, and not the magnificent whole it had been. But from the man’s terror at seeing Coën’s medallion, he’d known exactly which dead he’d been robbing, and hadn’t expected to find anyone alive with a better claim to the goods. Had this vulture walked over the bones of Coën’s brothers in the spring mud to pick through the spoils?

Coën felt a growl vibrating in his chest and swallowed it down. This merchant had not caused the avalanche. Better that scavengers like this profit off what remained of the keep than it be claimed by whoever had caused the disaster. And besides, the Griffins, if any others existed, were now homeless, maybe even hunted. Coën ripping this man’s throat out with his teeth would put this town in an uproar, and Coën wouldn’t stir more public hatred towards witchers than already existed. 

Coën held the man’s eyes for a moment longer, then turned his attention to the woman before him. “Yes, that loaf will do.” He handed over his coin and walked away without a backwards glance. The bread tasted of ash.

**Wisdom**

After a lucrative contract banishing a wraith from a neighboring village’s smithy, Coën purchased paper, pen, and ink to carry back to his little hayloft. Each evening by lantern light he wrote down what he could remember: the names of all the Griffins, from Erland of Larvik down to little Mikolaj, who’d stopped crying over his absent mother for a moment while he’d held the turtle Coën had carved. He wrote down the mottos carved into the courtyard archways in elder speech and an accounting of the meals they’d eaten that winter. He drew a map of the keep, and that’s when it struck him that the library had been lost. 

Coën had spent man, many hours in the magnificent library at Kaer Seren, with its soaring dome constructed long ago with elven magic, and housing a treasure trove of books larger than any other on the Continent. He’d been a runner for the elders, tracking down this tome or that for a research project. And he’d spent hours with his yearmates in the library’s massive study room, combing witcher histories for class assignments.

Coën barely left the hayloft for days as he scribbled down bits and pieces he’d memorized as a trainee. Passages from witcher journals and bestiaries and alchemy manuals, and the entire “Guide to Chivalric Virtues” verbatim. Where he couldn’t recall specific passages he scrawled titles and authors with summaries featuring varying levels of accuracy and detail. He described an erotic romance novel he and his yearmates had found on the shelves one winter as teenagers, and a collection of Dwarvish poetry he’d translated for a language class. 

For each book Coën remembered, though, there were a dozen or more he’d read or seen or held in his hands, now irrevocably, wholly gone. Coën was halfway through recording a half-remembered line on Sign theory when a drop of water splashed onto the page, blurring the ink. He sat back and scrubbed a hand over his face. 

Witchers didn’t have emotions. He’d even written that down somewhere on one of these scrolls. But the tightness in Coën’s throat and the shortness of his breath didn’t stop with that reminder. Soon he was curled in on himself, gasping out shallow breaths while tears fell onto the pages scattered before him, all that was left of the Griffin School’s legacy. 

Coën let the feelings pass through him, settling himself like he did for meditation, the way old Master Iwan had taught him as a very young child. Eventually he heard again the stamping and whickering of the horses below, the croaking of the frogs from the pond outside, the rustling of the trees in the evening breeze. He was here, and he was alive. 

Coën gathered the scrolls, rolled them up, and tied them with a spare bit of twine from his supplies. Perhaps he’d given them to a library someday. Perhaps he’d keep them. But a pile of papers was not truly all that was left of the Griffin School.

What made Coën a Griffin didn’t come from books. It was in the way he meditated, and the strength of his Signs and his recipe for Tawny Owl. It was written on his bones and planted in his heart and etched into the surface of his soul the way runes had been embedded in his silver sword: years of repetition and effort, until the things became inseparable. Whether Coën willed it or no, the School of the Griffin couldn’t die while Coën lived. 

He tucked the papers away in oilcloth and settled them into one of his bags, near the potion ingredients that shouldn’t get wet. And when he’d done that, he began packing up the other possessions that had accumulated in the hayloft: a few extra clothes, the lantern oil, a bowl and an eating knife. They all found their places in Coën’s baggage, too. 

Coën carried the bags down from the loft and stepped out into the warm evening air, breathing in the living smell of it. It was different from the smell of ice and broken stone that had lingered with him for months now. But being a Griffin meant being on the Path, and Coën had been absent from it for far too long now. It was time to leave.

He had enough to be getting on with.

**Author's Note:**

> According to the hazy collection of "facts" that is canon, there is at least one other Griffin alive, but he fucked off to a cave and was never seen again, soooooooo ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
